MAN, Commissioner of Customs to R. Hart, October 12, 1874

Summary of dispatch of J. A. Man to R. Hart respecting the case of D. J. Haliday.

Sir:* * * It will be necessary for me to pick up the connecting narrative from the point where Mr. Knight intimated to me that he would “take time to consider” my suggestion that the man should be allowed to resign, to briefly review the letter written by the same gentleman on the 6th instant, and to disprove on behalf of my subordinate certain allegations imported, somewhat irrelevantly, I think, into the controversy.

Hearing that Haliday was to be released from prison in the afternoon of the 29th of September, I wrote privately to Mr. Knight to the effect that I did not wish to advise any steps being taken until I had heard from him with reference to our previous conversation. He did not reply until after the man had been liberated, and in that reply he completely ignored the subject of our conversation, and the understanding with which we had parted. He simply declined to “sanction further punishment.” I at once answered, regretting his decision, and advising him that I felt compelled to let the matter take its official course.

* * * * * * *

On the game day I directed Captain Rennell to act as I considered had become his duty under Regulation VII,§ 2, of the pilotage laws; and at my order he addressed a dispatch to the manager of the pilot company, which forms the first of the series.

The “United States consul lays down, in his letter of October 6, the view he held to me in conversation, that the harbor-master can only act when the crime of the individual affects him as a pilot. This is opposed to the ruling more than once recorded by yourself. In the case of Evans, a British subject, you remarked, “At a port where the number of pilots has a fixed limit—that limitation being in their own interests, and to enable them to make a comfortable livelihood—it is the more incumbent on each individual to conduct himself properly; and it is the more the duty of those to whom he is subordinate to see that he does so conduct himself, and that he is, at all times, ready as a public servant to enter upon the work for which he may be detailed.”

Mr. Knight says, “There are grades of crime, and grades of punishment for them;” and he proceeds to argue in favor of the appellant. Agreeing with him in this dictum, I may be permitted to cull from the record of this pilot’s proceedings, since he has been in the exercise of his calling at Newchwang, the following facts:

• Nearly nine years ago, he was convicted of a most cowardly and brutal assault upon an old man who had offended him by certain published strictures on his conduct as a pilot.
• The “squabble” (as Mr. Knight terms it) in 1870 was another, and almost equally cowardly attack again upon a person less than half his size. For this he suffered seven days’ confinement; and I am told that it originated in a dispute with a ship-master on a question of pilotage.
• In November, 1872, an incident occurred not mentioned by Mr. Knight. While piloting the bark Baltic, she collided with a junk, and on the skipper coming on board the bark, Haliday interfered, assaulted the man, and drove him out of the ship. The German captain reported the case to the harbor-master, and lodged a complaint at his vice-consulate. Haliday was brought up and condemned to pay the junkman $50. Mr. Knight inflicted the sentence, and called in the harbor-master to assist in the investigation.
• The last assault for which Haliday has been punished was upon his native mistress, a few weeks after her confinement, and while she was still weak and suffering. It was in cold blood and intentional, and preceded by a row in the saloon of which he is part owner.
• In disturbances arising in the above-named establishment Haliday has at least on one occasion been concerned; but as I have no official knowledge, I only note the fact as bearing upon his character as given by Mr. Knight.
• At his trial the other day his consul, before passing sentence, read, him a long and severe lecture, in which he animadverted, with just severity, upon his previous convictions, and laid stress upon the many admonitions he had received. “Have I not myself warned you fifty times?” said Mr. Knight. In the face of these words, it is strange to now find him describing the man as “beyond question one of the most orderly and respectable of the pilot company.”

I now turn to Mr. Knight’s charge against the harbor-master, of “singular excess of authority;” and to the affidavit on which he founds the charge. To the statement of Richards, (who is a pilot and a salaried officer in the United States consulate, too.) Captain Rennell requests me to give a most emphatic and complete contradiction, From first to last, the sworn words recorded in that document are declared to be false in spirit and in letter.* * *

To enable you to form your own conclusion as to the character of the deponent, I send you a letter he addressed to the harbor-master, in answer to an order to move a German bark out of a dangerous position in which she had been improperly moored. I may add that this is the same Richards whose savage beating of one McCutcheon, because he had complained of a former assault, was the immediate cause of the late Mr. Meadows’ report to her Majesty’s minister in regard to a series of outrages in 1868.

Mr. Knight, in his letter, records the opinion that the judgment of the harbor-master and commissioner is a little severe. In relation to Captain Rennell I do know, however, that the one point upon which I have occasionally differed from him has been in his leniency toward members of the pilot body when guilty of shortcomings. I have, however, latterly come around to his views, formed, as those views were, after considerable experience, from a conviction of the impossibility of obtaining adequate support in cases where American or Scandinavian pilots were interested, and the consequent manifest injustice thereby entailed upon men of other nationalities.

I trust that I have now placed the matter before you circumstantially and clearly. I regret troubling you at this time, but I feel that Mr. Knight’s action vs. the harbormaster’s covers a question of jurisdiction in matters of discipline which has long required settlement at Newchwang, and which, if longer delayed, will only render still harder the task of keeping within bounds the few black sheep still left as a legacy from by-gone days. I have the satisfaction of knowing that the course I have advised, and he stand I have taken, are both approved by the representatives of the other treat powers, by Lloyd’s agent, and I believe by nearly every respectable resident of this place.

I have so done with the object of upholding a principle while ridding the locality of a bulky and the pilot-service of a disgrace.

I have, &c.,